Harold Whitehall

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH DICTIONARY

The evolution of the English dictionary is rooted in the general evolution of the English language. In this develop­ment the chief pressures were exerted by the steady in­crease in the word stock of English. Such an overall in­crease as this made the dictionary necessary. The pressure of vocabulary, however, has always been influenced and reinforced by the intellectual climate of each successive period of the language.

The beginnings of dictionary history are neither national nor concerned with any of the national languages. They are concerned with the international language of medieval European civilization: Latin. Our first word books are lists of relatively difficult Latin terms, usually those of a Scriptural nature, accompanied by glosses in easier or more familiar Latin. Very early in the Anglo-Saxon period, how­ever, we find glosses containing native English (i. е., Anglo-Saxon) equivalents for the hard Latin terms, and it may be that two of these — the Leiden and Erfurt Glosses — represent the earliest written English we possess. Such glosses, whether Latin-Latin or Latin-English, continued to be compiled during the entire Anglo-Saxon and most of the Middle-English period.

The next stage of development, attained in England around 1400, was the collection of the isolated glosses into what is called a glossarium, a kind of very early Latin-English dictionary. As it chances, our first example of the glossarium, the so-called Medulla Grammatica written in East Anglia around 1400, has never been printed; but two later redactions were among our earliest printed books. [...]

The first onset of the Renaissance worked against rather than in favor of the native English dictionary. The break­down of Latin as an international language and the rapid development of international trade led to an immediate demand for foreign-language dictionaries. The first of such works [...] was rapidly followed [...] by the best known of all such works, Florio’s Italian-English dictionary (1599). Meanwhile, the first great classical dictionary, Cooper’s Thesaurus (1565), had already appeared. [...] It should be noted, in passing, that none of these various word books of the 16th century actually used the title dictionary or dictionarium. They were called by various kinds of fanciful or half-fanciful names, of which hortus ‘garden’ and thesaurus ‘hoard’ were particularly popular.

During the late 16th century, the full tide of the Re­naissance had been sweeping a curious flotsam and jetsam into English literary harbors. Constant reading of Greek and Latin bred a race of Holofernes pedants who preferred the Latin or Greek term to the English term. Their prin­ciple in writing was to use Latino-Greek polysyllables in a Latino-English syntax. Their strange vocabulary — studded with what some critics call ‘inkhorn’ terms — even­tually affected English so powerfully that no non-Latinate Englishman could ever hope to read many works in his own language unless he was provided with explanations of elements unfamiliar to him. The Dictionary of Hard Words, the real predecessor of the modern dictionary, was devel­oped to provide precisely such explanations. It is significant that the first English word book to use the name dictionary, Cokeram’s The English Dictionary (1623), is subtitled An Interpreter of Hard Words. [...] If the 16th was the century of the foreign-language dictionary, the 17th was the century of the dictionary of hard words.

Between 1708 and 1721, hard-word dictionaries began to be replaced by word books giving ever-increasing at­tention to literary usage. [...]

The first word book to embody the ideals of the age was Nathaniel Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, originally published in 1721 [...] This, one of the most revolutionary dictionaries ever to appear, was the first to pay proper attention to current usage, the first to feature etymology, the first to give aid in syllabification, the first to give illustrative quotations (chiefly from proverbs), the first to include illustrations, and the first to indicate pronunciation. An interleaved copy of the 1731 folio edition was the basis of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755; through Johnson, it influenced all sub­sequent lexicographical practice. The position of dictionary pioneer, commonly granted to Johnson or to Noah Webster, belongs in reality to one of the few geniuses lexicog­raphy ever produced: Nathaniel Bailey.

Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) enormously extends the techniques developed by Bailey. Johnson was able to re­vise Bailey’s crude etymologies [...], to make a systematic use of illustrative quotations, to fix the spelling of many disputed words, to develop a really discriminating system of definition, and to exhibit the vocabulary of English much more fully than had ever been attempted before. [...] It (his two-volume work — Ed.)dominated English letters for a full century after its appearance and, after various revisions, continued in common use until 1900. As late as ‘90’s, most Englishmen used the word dictionary asa mere synonym for Johnson’s Dictionary; in 1880 a Bill was ac­tually thrown out of Parliament because a word in it was not in “the Dictionary”.

One of the tasks taken upon himself by Johnson was to remove “improprieties and absurdities” from the language. [...] The dictionaries of the second half of the 18^th century extended this notion particularly to the field of pronunciation. [...] Various pronunciation experts edited a series of pronunciation dictionaries. Of these, the most important are [...] Thomas Sheridan’s General Dictionary of the English Language (1780), and John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791). [...]

If the chief contributions of the 18^th century to dic­tionary making were (1) authoritative recording of literary vocabulary and (2) accurate recording of pronunciation, those of the 19^th were unmistakably (1) the recording of word history through dated quotations and (2) the development of encyclopedic word books. Already in 1755, Samuel Johnson had hinted in his preface that the sense of a word “may easily be collected entire from the examples”. During the first twenty-five years of the century the researches of R. K. Rask, J. L. C. Grimm, and F. Bopp clearly de­fined the historical principle in linguistics. It was only a question of time, therefore, before someone combined Johnson’s perception with the findings of the new science of historical linguistics. That person was Charles Richardson, who, in his New Dictionary of the English Language (1836), produced a dictionary completely lacking definitions but one in which both the senses and the historical evolution of the senses were accurately indicated by dated defining quotations. Richardson’s work leads directly to the great New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, first organ­ized in 1858, begun under Sir James Murray in 1888, and completed under Sir William Craigie in 1928. With its supplement (1933), the New English Dictionary or Oxford English Dictionary (N.E.D. or О.Е.D.) covers the vo­cabulary of English with a completeness of historical evi­dence and a discrimination of senses unparalleled in linguistic history. [...]

Since the publication of the О.Е.D., the only impor­tant British dictionary has been Henry Cecil Wyld’s Uni­versal Dictionary of the English Language (1932), a work of somewhat restricted vocabulary coverage but one which may well point the way to the dictionary of the future. Wyld has discarded the older logical definitions for defi­nitions of a more functional nature; his examples delve deeply into idiom; his etymologies are of a completeness and modernity unparalleled in any medium-sized word book. [...]

The modern American dictionary is typically a single compact volume published at a relatively modest price containing: (1) definitive American spellings, (2) pronun­ciation indicated by diacritical markings, (3) strictly lim­ited etymologies, (4) numbered senses, (5) some illustrations, (6) selective treatment of synonyms and antonyms, (7) encyclopedic inclusion of scientific, technological, geo­graphical, and biographical items. [...]

The first American dictionaries were unpretentious little schoolbooks based chiefly on Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 by way of various English abridgments of that work. [...] The most famous work of this class, Noah Webster’s Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) was an enlargement of Entick’s Spelling Dictionary (London, 1764), distinguished from its predecessors chiefly by a few encyclopedic supplements and emphasis upon its (supposed) Americanism. The book was never popular and contributed little either to Webster’s own reputation or to the development of the American dictionary in general.

The first important date in American lexicography is 1828. The work that makes it important is Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language in two volumes. Webster’s book has many deficiencies — etymologies quite untouched by the linguistic science of the time, a rudimentary pronunciation system actually inferior to that used by Walker in 1791, etc. — but in its insistence upon American spellings, in definitions keyed to the Amer­ican scene, and in its illustrative quotations from the Founding Fathers of the Republic, it provided the country with the first native dictionary comparable in scope with that of Dr. Johnson. [...] Probably its greatest contribu­tion to succeeding American dictionaries was the style of definition writing — writing of a clarity and pithiness never approached before its day.

The first American lexicographer to hit upon the partic­ular pattern that distinguishes the American dictionary was Webster’s lifelong rival, Joseph E. Worcester. His Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanation Dictionary of the English Languange (1830), actually a thoroughly revised abridgment of Webster’s two-volume work of 1828, was characterized by the additions of new words, a more con­servative spelling, brief, well-phrased definitions, full indication of pronunciation by means of diacritics, use of stress marks to divide syllables, and lists of synonyms. Because it was compact and low priced, it immediately became popular — far more popular, in fact, than any of Webster’s own dictionaries in his own lifetime. [...]

In the field of unabridged dictionaries, the most im­portant accretion is the Century Dictionary (1889), edited by the great American linguist, William Dwight Whitney, and issued in six volumes. [...] At the moment, the most important advances in lexicography are taking place in the field of the abridged collegiate-type dictionaries.

Meanwhile the scholarly dictionary has not been neg­lected. Once the New English Dictionary was published, scholarly opinion realized the need to supplement it in the various periods of English and particularly in American English. The first of the proposed supplements edited by Sir William Craigie and Professor J. R. Hulbert, is the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, completed in 1944. This was followed by a Dictionary of Americanisms, edited by Mitford M. Mathews and published in 1951.A Middle English Dictionary, a Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, and a Dictionary of Later Scottish are in preparation, and work on the American Dialect Dictionary of the American Dialect Society is now finally under way.